It won’t matter how hot it gets or how much she sweats or how many people around her are wearing T-shirts or less on Saturday during San Diego’s gay Pride Parade.

Joanna Gasca won’t take off her jacket. It means too much to her.

After nearly 29 years and countless uniform changes in the U.S. Air Force, Gasca will don her blue jacket to march with a uniformed, active-duty military contingent in her hometown’s Pride Parade for the first time.

“Hot is based on one’s perspective,” Gasca said. “It’s not a problem.”

She’ll be surrounded by hundreds of other service members, veterans and their families. Some will be gay, some straight. Some will be in street clothes, some in T-shirts bearing the names of their branches of service.

Don’t be surprised if the loudest cheers are aimed at those in uniform. None of the expected 150,000 parade watchers will have seen anything like it.

After many of these marchers wore branch-specific T-shirts in last year’s parade to celebrate the pending end of the Pentagon’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, parade organizers boasted that the active-duty contingent was a first for gay-pride gatherings around the country.

This year, organizers added another first: They urged service members to ask their commanding officers for permission to march in their uniforms.

It’s tough to argue with the rationale. The Pride Parade is a civic, even patriotic, event — rather than a political one. Police officers and firefighters march, and the Department of Defense doesn’t prohibit participation.

But Sean Sala, who has helped organize the parade’s military contingent since last year, told me that some members’ requests are being shot down.

“We’re just trying to show people that we bleed the same blood,” said Sala, who served in the Navy for six years. “The greatest message is, ‘I wear the same thing you wear.’”

Gasca, a senior recruiter for reservists at Luke Air Force base in Arizona who is charged with training other recruiters, cried when she read the email containing the approvals she needed to return home and march in her uniform in front of her family. Because last year’s parade was an affirmation, Gasca expects this one to be off the charts.

“People were just with us on that day,” she said. “That was probably one of the best days in my career, and I think this Saturday is going to be the best — absolutely, by far.”

Her mother is also looking forward to it.

“We’re just really, really proud,” Lucia Chavez said. “I know that this really means a lot to her, especially being in uniform, and I hope that other people join her and support the cause.”

Count Army Spec. Brenna Saldana in. She’ll be wearing her digital camouflage uniform and thinking of an Internet meme of an image of a soldier’s tombstone that reads, “They gave me a medal for killing two men, and they gave me a discharge for loving one.”

“Being an active-duty service member with the ability and the possibility and the honor to march proudly as an openly gay soldier, I feel like I carry their legacy with me,” she said.